25.11.04

A BRITISH spy who saved 10,000 Jews from the Nazi Holocaust by secretly falsifying their papers, gaining their release from concentration camps and hiding them from the Gestapo in his own flat was honoured as a "true British hero" in Berlin yesterday.

Frank Foley's official job was that of passport control officer at Berlin's British embassy during the 1930s. However, the bespectacled, middle-aged bureaucrat was, in reality, the head of British intelligence in the German capital, a post which he held until the outbreak of World War II.

He used his cover to save an estimated 10,000 Jews from being deported to the Nazi death camps, often bending the rules under which London was trying to limit Jewish migration to then British-ruled Palestine.